Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Trotskyism in occupied France

I have translated the complete surviving collection of Arbeiter und Soldat, the clandestine paper produced by the French Trotskyists (Comités de la IVe Internationale) for Wehrmacht soldiers in 1943-44. It has been published as a supplement to the latest issue of the Alliance for Workers' Liberty paper Solidarity.

By summer 1943 the Axis war machine was suffering heavy setbacks. Although Hitler had completed a full occupation of France in November 1942, and still held on to his conquests in the Low Countries, Denmark, Norway, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Greece, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic States and parts of western Russia, the Axis powers no longer looked able to win the war. The German defeat at Stalingrad, after months of exaggeration of Wehrmacht success in the Nazi media, and the subsequent loss of much of south-western Russia; the incompetence of the Italian army; the Allies’ conquest of North African and threatened landings in southern Italy; Japan’s defeats at the hands of the United States in the Pacific; Tito’s Yugoslav partisan movement which had taken control of much of Macedonia, southern Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina and part of Slovenia; and the mounting French Resistance, led by Charles de Gaulle and the French Communist Party, were all bad omens for the Nazi leaders and their satraps.

Indeed, with increasing privations, bombings of cities and military disasters, there were significant stirrings of discontent in the Axis powers. Not only did high-up German officers initiate plots to remove Hitler in order to better manage the war effort (the closest-run, and final such attempt to do so was the well-known 20 July 1944 attempt on Hitler’s life by Claus von Stauffenberg), but in Rome the Fascist Grand Council actually voted 19-7 on 24 July 1943 to no-confidence Benito Mussolini, who was summoned to the King Victor Emmanuel III, arrested and taken to jail in an ambulance. This manoeuvre on the part of the King and the Marshal Pietro Badoglio was an attempted ‘revolution from above’ mounted to save the ruling class from the threat of working-class uprisings, after the huge strike waves in the industrial north starting in March 1943 including stoppages in major armaments plants in Milan and Turin to secure more evacuation allowances – the first big strikes since 1925. As the Partito Comunista Internazionalista commented in August:

“The bourgeoisie, the monarchy and the Church, who created and supported Fascism, who today are throwing Mussolini to the people to avoid going down with him, and who don democratic and populist clothes in order to continue the exploitation and oppression of the working class, have no right to say anything in today’s crisis. This right exclusively belongs to the working class, the peasants and the soldiers, the eternal victims of the imperialist octopus.”

The late World War II period is usually compared unfavourably to the wave of revolutionary struggles provoked by World War I (the February and October revolutions in the Russian empire; large anti-war demonstrations in Germany; and after the war the Bavarian soviet republic; the Hungarian soviet republic; and a series of revolutionary opportunities in Germany until 1923), contrary to Trotsky’s prediction that it would cause an even greater revolutionary crisis. However, during this period there were signs significant working-class struggles in several belligerent countries, including the efforts of the resurgent Italian workers’ movement; miners’ strikes in Britain and the United States; strikes tens of thousands strong against forced deportations in France and Belgium; the Warsaw Ghetto uprising; and small-scale mutinies in the German armed forces.

But for the most part working-class mobilisation was co-opted into the Allied war effort. Hundreds of thousands of workers who supported the Communist Parties of Europe, loyal as they were to Stalin’s Soviet Union, courageously devoted themselves to anti-occupation “resistance” armies led by bourgeois nationalists in the belief that it was the best way of fighting fascism. The hollowness of Stalin’s “anti-fascist” credentials was however made clear by his keenness for CPs to work alongside the same nationalists, generals and bankers who had helped the fascists crush the workers’ movements of Europe to start with. For example, he created in Moscow a “Committee for a Free Germany” mostly composed of ex-Nazi generals; along with the other Allies supposedly liberating Europe from fascism he left Franco in power in Spain and Salazar in Portugal; he betrayed his own supporters in Greece, who were then butchered by the monarchists’ allies, the British Army, at the end of that country’s Civil War; and he ordered the Italian CP to support the monarchy and lay down its weapons. Although this was in a sense nothing new – before the war the French CP leader Maurice Thorez had called on “patriotic” French fascists to join a “national front” against the Nazis – Stalin’s leading role in the stabilisation of European capitalism in the 1943-1945 period was a shock to some, with a 2,500-strong Stalinist formation Movimento Comunista d’Italia even breaking from the Italian CP under the impression that they were implementing Stalin’s “real” policies and that the local CP leader Palmiro Togliatti was being disloyal to Moscow!

The Communist Parties and Moscow, who still had enormous prestige among much of the world working class, were hostile to all strikes and any independent working-class action which might undermine the Allied war effort. The British Stalinist leader Harry Pollitt even proclaimed “today it is the class conscious worker who will cross the picket line”. Despite the USSR’s August 1939-June 1941 pact with Hitler to carve up Eastern Europe, Stalin’s imperialist ambitions were now completely intertwined with the war aims of the Allies – indeed, the “Soviet” empire would be a leading, if not the leading, beneficiary of the Allied victory, extending its grip over almost all of Eastern and Central Europe and seizing tens of billions of pounds worth of war reparations. The nationalist and anti-German chauvinist hysteria promoted by Moscow, which portrayed the war to the Russian people as just another chapter in the Slavs’ struggle against the Germans, must be seen as largely responsible for the vengeance exacted on the German people at the end of the war with hundreds of thousands of rapes of women and girls, the murder and leaving to starve of millions of civilians as well as organising huge population transfers. In France the Communist Party raised the slogans “everyone, united against the Krauts” and “everyone kill a Kraut”, refusing to draw any distinction between Nazi-led German imperialism and the working-class German conscripts in the Wehrmacht.

This monumental error was only replicated in part by the Trotskyist Fourth International, which had no truck whatsoever with the idea that workers in the Allied countries should cross picket lines to aid the USSR’s war effort or that the war was a war between ‘democratic nations’ and ‘fascist nations’. However, the Fourth International press did foster illusions in the progressive character of the USSR’s war effort, claiming that as a “degenerated workers’ state” with a nationalised economy it deserved support against the Axis, and furthermore in some of its sections’ press hailed the progress of “Trotsky’s Red Army” in fighting back the Wehrmacht. American Trotskyist James Cannon said that Trotskyists would “fight in the front rank” of the Soviet army to defend the USSR. Of course, the Fourth International’s enthusiastic claims that the USSR’s successes in the war were the result of continuing “Leninist planning” or Trotsky’s role in establishing the Red Army were nonsensical; the Russian economy had experienced complete counter-revolution, with an atomised working-class unable to act independently with its own unions, soviets or party, never mind plan the economy for itself; the Communist Party had been completely gutted, with almost all the leading actors in the revolution executed by Stalin; the Red Army high command had itself been purged repeatedly, while rank, titles and saluting had been reintroduced as well as orders and military academies named after Tsarist war heroes like Aleksandr Suvorov; early setbacks in the war at the hands of Germany (whose own war economy was almost entirely state-run) ran counter to claims of the superiority of the Russian economy over the capitalist countries; and indeed throughout the war the Russians relied heavily on food supplies and military equipment from the United States, including thousands of Studebaker trucks.

However, despite this misunderstanding of the role of the USSR in the war, the Fourth International and its member organisations did mount a heroic struggle against national chauvinism and illusions in the democratic aspirations of Britain and the United States. French Trotskyists were sharply critical of the Gaullist “French Resistance”, characterising it as an instrument of Allied imperialism and a movement which aspired not simply to liberate France but also to let it hold onto its colonial empire. Rather than calling on the working class to act as a supporting cast for the Allied war effort, these internationalists called for fraternisation between soldiers, working-class struggle against the participating governments and a “revolutionary defeatist” attitude towards both sides, hoping to transform the imperialist war into international class war. As Jean Rous had explained in a motion to the centrist Parti Socialiste Ouvrier et Paysan’s congress in 1939:

“The party will not be put off the belief that the main enemy is in our own country by the possibility that mass revolutionary agitation in time of war may contribute to the military defeat of our country. Accepting this possibility does not mean encouraging or wanting victory for Hitler, but on the contrary will encourage the total defeat of Hitler and worldwide fascism. Indeed:

“1. Revolutionary agitation led by workers in our country will exercise a powerful contagious influence on workers in the fascist countries; will provoke the break up of the rival capitalist armies, fraternisation between soldiers of both sides and the collapse of the dictatorships; and will light the flame of world revolution, the only means of defeating war and fascism, across the globe.

“2. Besides, a revolutionary seizure of power by the working class in our country will turn the imperialist war into a civil war and create the conditions for meaningful national defence: only a proletariat in control of its own destiny and defending a socialist order will be able to mount an invincible resistance to foreign fascism…”

It was with this aim of winning over German troops to a common struggle against the belligerent imperialists that in summer 1943 the French Trotskyists turned to organising among the German troops occupying France. Given the strict discipline of the Wehrmacht and the murderous anti-communism of the Gestapo (and their French accomplices, the Milice) this was incredibly dangerous, but important both in terms of teaching the French workers to repudiate the chauvinist attitudes promoted by the Communist Party and in terms of encouraging dissent among the German ranks, as had been manifested earlier in 1943 by a submarine mutiny in Brest, north-western France. The French Comités de la IVe Internationale (Fourth International Committees) produced German-language leaflets for Wehrmacht troops as well as a monthly German-language newspaper, Arbeiter und Soldat (i.e. Worker and Soldier) and built links with German troops.

This was not the only such initiative. The paper of the group associated with Pierre Frank and Raymond Molinier, formerly known as la Commune but from September 1943 as le Soviet, had a German-language back page, and the group also had contacts in Germany. But more important for the Fourth International group were the efforts arising from the German troops themselves. German Trotskyist produced a paper Zeitung für Arbeiter und Soldat im Westen (i.e. News for the Worker[s] and Soldier[s] in the West) and furthermore a previously unorganised group of soldiers in Brittany produced Der Arbeiter (i.e. The Worker). The latter journal encouraged dissent amongst the ranks but also called on conscripted workers to “throw down your weapons and go home”, a slogan opposed by the Fourth International Committees, who wanted the workers to hang on to their weapons and carefully organise for an uprising to overthrow the Nazis before the Allied “liberators” plundered Germany. The Fourth International Committees therefore held discussions with revolutionary soldiers and tried to carry out joint agitation.

Yvan Craipeau’s book Contre vents et marées quotes the electrics worker Roland Filiâtre, one of the comrades responsible for this work (under the alias Dupont): “The French comrades started discussions with German soldiers and got them talking and giving hints of their past politics. Once they had shown themselves trustworthy, after screening they were put in touch with the German soldiers who produced Der Arbeiter and then taken care of by their organisation. The Paris region was organised as two branches. But the heart of the organisation was in Brittany, both around Nantes and in particular around Brest where the soldiers provided the party with Ausweis [identity cards] and weapons. In Brest the organisation had about fifty soldiers on average despite some people being posted elsewhere. Contacts were established in Toulon, Valence, La Rochelle and at Conches aerodrome. There was also an organisation in Belgium. Links were established with the German Trotskyist organisation, most importantly in the port of Hamburg, in Lübeck and in Rostock. Victor [a German Trotskyist, whose real name was Widelin] was responsible for these contacts. Arbeiter und Soldat was also distributed in garrisons in Italy.”

These brave efforts brought down harsh repression on the heads of the French Trotskyists, many of whom such as Yvan Craipeau had repeatedly raised the alarm in the group about certain comrades’ lack of care in evading detection. Realising these fears, young Fourth International activists imprudently but enthusiastically joined in a demonstration staged by Der Arbeiter activists through the streets of Kerhoun, singing the Internationale and thus attracted the attention of the fascist police. Not much later, in early October 1943 a meeting of Trotskyist activists and German soldiers held in Brest was found out by the Gestapo, who arrested all the participants. 17 German soldiers as well as Robert Cruau, who organised fraternisation in the region, were executed on 6 October. Once the Gestapo were on the trail, the Trotskyists were doomed. On 7 October 18 Fourth International Committees activists in Brittany were arrested, along with much of the Paris organisation. In total around fifty French activists were rounded up, and many of them were tortured, executed or sent to concentration camps. Similarly, as many as fifty Der Arbeiter soldier comrades were put to death, and their paper never reappeared. Arbeiter und Soldat was itself out of action until May 1944, such were the losses suffered by the Fourth International Committees.

For these courageous activists the class struggle never stopped: even having been arrested and taken to the Compiègne transit camp Marcel Beaufrère told his comrades that: “We are going to be deported to Buchenwald. Before leaving I want to say: we are going to meet up with German revolutionaries and make the revolution with them.” Indeed, the French Trotskyists set up a cell at the Buchenwald concentration camp and in April 1944 it managed to release a manifesto calling for: “revolutionary fraternisation with the workers in the armies of occupation. For a Germany of workers’ councils in a Europe of workers’ councils! For the world workers’ revolution!”. But the sad fact was that many of these activists would soon be murdered by the Nazis. In reality the task with which the Trotskyist movement was confronted, lifting the world working class from the abyss of imperialist war, fascism and Stalinism, was far beyond their extremely modest numbers and means. Not only the crushing of the German workers’ movement by fascism but also Stalinist misleadership and the ensuing co-option of working-class and democratic struggle by the Allied imperialists meant that working-class revolution as had been seen at the end of the war twenty-five years previously was nigh-on impossible. Despite all these difficulties the Trotskyists fought to promote the internationalist Marxist tradition, and here we reproduce the surviving propaganda distributed among German troops occupying France in 1943-44, both the collection of Arbeiter und Soldat and the sole extant fragment of Zeitung für Arbeiter und Soldat im Westen.

4 comments:

Excellent intro, comrade. It is interesting that most comrades do know a lot about post-WWI upheavals but next to nothing about what happened in the latter part of WWII. Cheers for modestly helping rectify that.